When he returned he went back to live in that house, but now no one ever entered it except the priest; and he went not for any social purpose, but to say Mass over the woman’s bed, which her husband had turned into an altar.  Every day those two said Mass at that bed, though it was five years since she had died.  That was a queer enough story for the present day, with its woman won by bloodshed and the long unassuagable grief of the lover and the resort to religion that struck us as irreverent because it was so utterly believing; it might have come out of the Decameron.  But the last touch of wildness was added by the identity of the man in the automobile.  For he was the Marquis d’Italica, the finest Spanish aviator, a man not only of the mediaeval courage one might have guessed from the story, but also of the most modern wit about machines....

Yaverland bit his lip suddenly.  He had told the story without shame, for he knew well and counted it among the heartening facts of life, like the bravery of seamen and the sweetness of children, that to a man a woman’s bed may sometimes be an altar.  But Mr. Philip had ducked his head and his ears were red.  Shame was entering the room like a bad smell.

For a minute Yaverland did not dare to look at Ellen.  “I had forgotten she was a girl,” he thought miserably.  “I thought of nothing but how keen she is on Spain.  I don’t know how girls feel about things....”  But she was sitting warm and rosy in a happy dream, looking very solemnly at a picture she was making in the darkness over his left shoulder.  She had liked the story, although the thought of men fighting over a woman made her feel sick, as any conspicuous example of the passivity common in her sex always did.  But the rest she had thought lovely.  It was a beautiful idea of the Marquis’s to turn the bed into an altar.  Probably he had often gone into his wife’s room to kiss her good-night.  She saw a narrow iron bedstead such as she herself slept in, a face half hidden by the black hair flung wide across the pillow, a body bent like a bow under the bedclothes; for she herself still curled up at nights as dogs and children do; and the Marquis, whom she pictured as carrying a robin’s egg blue enamelled candlestick like the one she always carried up to her room, kneeling down and kissing his wife very gently lest she should awake.  Love must be a great compensation to those who have not political ambitions.  She became aware that Yaverland’s eyes were upon her, and she slowly smiled, reluctantly unveiling her good will to him.  It again appeared to him that the world was a place in which one could be at one’s ease without disgrace.

He stood up and brought a close to the business interview, and was gripping Mr. Philip’s hand, when a sudden recollection reddened his face.  “Ah, there’s one thing,” he said quite lightly, though the vein down the middle of his forehead had darkened.  “You see from those letters that a Senor Vicente de Rojas is making an offer for the house.  He’s not to have it.  Do you understand?  Not at any price.”